132 Barrande and the Taconic System — Marcou. 
more of strata are at the base of the scale of formations or be¬ 
long to systems far above; (3) and whether we shall have to 
abandon stratigraphy and lithology to tbe mercy of incompetent 
palaeontologists—incompetence proved again and again by their 
inability to determine fossils, blundering not only in their iden¬ 
tification of species, but even in their determination of genera 
and families. 
Never have so many errors, as well in stratigraphy as in 
palaeontology, and even in lithology, been committed. In any 
country where there exists a great number of free and inde¬ 
pendent geologists—say one thousand or fifteen hundred geolo¬ 
gists, instead of two or three hundred as we are still limited to on 
this continent—the maintenance of such extraordinary errors dur¬ 
ing so many years;—almost fifty years—would have been ma¬ 
terially impossible, more especially after the interference of Bar- 
i^nde and Marcou. The want of a free geological “public opin¬ 
ion” has been taken advantage of with great and persistent alac- 
crity, and an easy coalition of Directors of Geological Surveys 
and editors of scientific periodicals, has imposed their ideas and 
conclusions without any sort of control, going so far, even 
until this day, as to omit systematically every fact and every 
memoir or paper which it is disagreeable for them to answer. 
But free and independent geologists have begun, during the 
last five or six years, to be conscious of their own existence as a 
body, in committees, in new periodical journals, and in associa¬ 
tions of scientific men; there are now enough to constitute a 
certain “public opinion,” with which all the Geological Surveys 
and partisans associations should be obliged, before long, to 
reckon, and look for approbation or disapprobation of their 
purely scientific work. It is a long wished for desideratum in 
North America. And now, we can say with certainty that the 
errors of the last fifty years will not last another half of a cen¬ 
tury before they are “allowed to be and remain part of the past.” 
Mr. Dana’s letter to von Dechen. —The cause of the Ta¬ 
conic system is just and has raised the interest of all geologists, 
the world over. My paper: “The Taconic system and its 
position in stratigraphic geology,” 1885, and a French transla¬ 
tion of it, chapter vi, ‘Taconic versus Cambrian and Silurian” 
in the Bulletin Soc. geol ., France, tome xii, p. 517, 1884, have 
been read most extensively and have put the question on such a 
